No Recipe Sorbet

Excuse my while I geek out a little bit, but this little bit of geekery will enable you to make delicious sorbets without a recipe. Did you know you can make sorbet with only a hens egg as your guide? No recipe, no weighing just an egg? Before you try and get me committed, give me a minute to explain.

To make the perfect sorbet you need to get the balance of fruit puree and sugar spot on. Too much sugar the sorbet will never freeze, too little and it will freeze solid. You can of course follow a recipe but if you’ve been to the market and picked up some beautiful fruits and don’t have a recipe at hand what do you do? You could shell out on a refractometer, a fancy device used to measure the concentration of sugar in a mixture, but unless your setting up shop I doubt its worth the investment. Instead all you need to do is this, first of all prepare a batch of sugar syrup, equal parts water and sugar boiled together for a few minutes until the sugar has dissolved (this lasts for a really long time and can also be used in cocktails so whip a big batch and store in the fridge). Secondly prepare your fruit. For this post I whipped up a batch of mango and passionfruit sorbet so I simply peeled a few mangos, cut the fruit from the stone and added the inside of a couple of passion fruits. Using a blender I pureed the fruit and then passed it through a sieve to remove the passion fruit seeds and any stringy parts of the mango. At this point you’re ready to make the sorbet.

All you need to do is add the sugar syrup a little bit at a time, until the sorbet mixture taste right (always make it a little sweeter than you think as freezing dulls sweetness). Add a couple tablepoons of glucose and mix together (this helps keep the sugar crystals small so you get a smoother sorbet). Now comes the egg. Place a clean hens egg into the sorbet mixture and watch how it floats. If it sticks out of the mixture a lot then it has too high a concentration of sugar and you need to add more fruit puree or water. If the egg is sitting below the surface of the mixture it needs more sugar so add a little more sugar syrup. You are looking for the egg to just be poking out of the mixture (as in the below picture) so that the visible egg is about the size of a 10 pence piece (or a quarter if you are reading this in the US). At this point all I do is add a little acid – a couple tbsp of lemon or lime juice and a good pinch of salt – both of these are simply to give the flavour of the sorbet a good punch.

At this point you can simply churn the sorbet according to your machines instructions, and then after a couple of hours in the freezer you should have a beautiful, flavourful and more importantly scoopable sorbet.

With this method no matter what fruit you have you can easily whip up a beautiful sorbet and without a single recipe or instruction, easy peasy!